A Thoughtful Restoration Returns an Italian Villa Outside Turin to Form

It can be strangely powerful, this business of bringing an old house back to life. People who devote years to rescuing neglected structures often enter into a nurturing relationship that over time acquires an almost human quality. The periodic challenges and setbacks, the unwieldy expense, the intricacy of building codes, the endlessly delayed gratification—surviving all this with equanimity is a sign of having fallen under a curious spell. You might as well call it love.

The house healing that Susie and Gianni Ropolo have overseen in the decade since they began working on their villa in Moncalieri, in the hills outside Turin, Italy, has been about wresting back an estimable, though broken, building. He is an oral surgeon, Turinese by birth and upbringing; she is an American who grew up in—and valued—old structures on the East Coast. They married 16 years ago, had two sons (Tyler and John Eldredge, now 15 and 12) and then began the quest for a house that, as Susie Ropolo puts it, “touched us in some profound way.”

When she first saw the house, she knew at once that her life was going to be lived within its dilapidated walls. Other, less besotted people might have thought further. The roof was shot. Windows were missing or had been blocked up. The room that appeared destined to be the living room was still being used as a stalla and fienile—a stable and hayloft, respectively. The plumbing, electricity and heating systems were either nonexistent or unsalvageable. The land adjoining the house needed regrading; the garden—well, there was no garden.

What the house did have was a rich, if obscured, history, abundant space with the possibility of abundant light and an immense beauty waiting to be reawakened.

As far as the Ropolos can tell, the house has had at least three different incarnations. Its oldest section was probably part of a monastery and may date back 600 years. Next comes the 400-year-old villa-like portion of the building, today comprising the entrance hall, kitchen, dining room, basement and laundry room, with bedrooms and dressing rooms above; the proportions of these rooms and the very fact that there is an entrance hall (rather than a door opening into the kitchen) suggest a degree of refinement that classes the architecture above a rustic farmhouse—though rustic farmhouse was indeed its third and abiding use. When the Ropolos took possession, there was still hay in the fienile (presumed age: 300), and the tenant farmer had closed up several windows in order to make the place easier to heat.

The rehabilitation that the Ropolos began in 1995 originally followed a fairly conventional path: They engaged an architect and a builder, plans were drawn up, and work started. Then Susie Ropolo came to visit one day and saw cement being put up over the old stone walls with a heavy modern finish. “These people were professionals,” she recalls, “but they wanted to simplify and to modernize, while we wanted to do everything possible to maintain the integrity of the materials, the sense of the human touch.”

The architect and the builder went, and the Ropolos moved into a house with a single functioning bath and a patched-together kitchen. But the couple had a deep reservoir of patience. Early on they met Giacomo Aimo, a fourth-generation decorative painter, who became the project’s guardian angel. “Giacomo is like the living memory of the building and beautifying of this region,” Gianni Ropolo says. “He could read the age of the house from the way the stones were laid. He knew how to restore old walls and create appropriate new ones. He helped us make the house not so much what it was as what it might have been.”

The house that might have been is now a remarkably graceful place, alive with the kind of relaxed air that comes only after a period of complete obsessiveness. Susie Ropolo seems never to have come across timeworn materials she could resist rescuing: wood floors, shutters and doors; terra-cotta tiles; iron hinges, latches and knobs; even a 1960s Triplex stove. When she couldn’t find an old door to fit a particular opening, or a cupboard or bookshelf that was in the right scale to her ample rooms, she had new ones built in a classic style and then handed them over to Aimo.

His work on the Ropolos’ house is a kind of sustained poem in honor of traditional Piedmontese interior decoration. He tinted plaster walls in ocher, blue gray, apricot, ecru and sage. He painted faux-marbre backsplashes, imaginary crests, trompe l’oeil moldings and whimsical swags. Even a rustic tabletop, under his deft brushwork, became an object of endearing beauty. “He was our magician,” Susie recalls. “We could never have finished the house without him.”

Finished, for Susie and Gianni Ropolo, is a malleable word. While the house is fully and sensitively furnished with Italian and French country pieces, some bought in shops, others from friends who were scaling down their own lives, it still has a handful of secret, untouched areas. On the horizon are the top floor of the tower, slated to become Susie Ropolo’s office, and a shaft of raw space at the rear of the villa, possible future guest rooms. “You don’t really take on a project like this,” says Susie Ropolo. “It takes you on—for a lifetime.”